I often check Twitter on my phone. When I see tweets with links in
them I tend to skip over them intending to return later when I’m on a
computer with a full-size screen, and then forget about them either
because I find something else to look at or I can’t be bothered with
scrolling all the way down again. And looking through old tweets is
nearly as bad on the full-size twitter web site as it is in a mobile
client.

Proposed solution: I need a computer program to read the Internet for me

Thus, Twitling: a small
script consisting of Ruby and Sinatra and OmniAuth and the Twitter gem
and Typhoeus to grab links in parallel, the function of which is to
read one’s timeline and display the resolved URL, the title and an
excerpt from the text of each link that was posted. Source code is on
Github.

I haven’t really used it myself yet in anger: the first thing I notice
while testing it is that there are a whole lot more links in my feed
than I thought there were, and the original plan to produce a 24 hour
digest might become very unwieldy.

Possible further development ideas include

speed it up, by prefetching, better caching, or fetching the links
asynchronously and client-side

an “older” link at the bottom of the page

Atom/RSS output so it gets fed to me every so often and I don’t have
to remember to check it

email output (for the same reason)

some css gradient fills just to make it look modern (hey, I already
used text-shadow, what do you want, round button borders?)